By Steven J. Mariconda

Back Cover Text

For nearly three decades, Steven J. Mariconda has been one of the keenest analysts of H. P.
Lovecraft’s variegated literary work. In the 1980s, he wrote landmark articles on
Lovecraft’s prose style, demonstrating how the dreamer from Providence utilized an array
of rhetorical techniques to generate maximum power and effectiveness in the writing of weird
fiction. Mariconda also focused on Lovecraft’s relations to Modernist writers such as
T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane, proving that Lovecraft was a small but significant voice in the
general literary tendencies of his time.

Mariconda has also written penetrating articles on specific stories, including significant
essays on the literary sources of “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Haunter of
the Dark.” And in the pioneering article “Toward a Reader-Response Approach to the
Lovecraft Mythos,” Mariconda showed how Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos grew out of
responses by readers and fellow writers of Weird Tales as each story successively
engendered a sense of the reality of this invented cosmogony.

As a reviewer, Mariconda has been acute in evaluating the leading Lovecraft scholarship of the
past thirty years. But his work is far from solemn or pedantic; in an appendix to this book we
find delightful strokes of humor, such as “A Real Hard Lovecraft Quiz.”

This volume of Steven J. Mariconda’s collected essays establishes him as a leading voice
in the dynamic Lovecraft scholarship of our time.

Contents

IntroductionI. General Studies

H. P. Lovecraft: Consummate Prose Stylist

Lovecraft’s Concept of “Background”

Toward a Reader-Response Approach to the Lovecraft Mythos

Lovecraft’s Cosmic Imagery

H. P. Lovecraft: Art, Artifact and Reality

H. P. Lovecraft: Reluctant American Modernist

“Expect Great Revelations”: Lovecraft Criticism in His Centennial Year

II. Essays on Specific Works

On “Amissa Minerva”

Amissa Minerva, by H.P. Lovecraft

“The Hound”—A Dead Dog?

“Hypnos”: Art, Philosophy, and Insanity

Curious Myths of the Middle Ages and “The Rats in the Walls”

Lovecraft’s “Elizabethtown”

On the Emergence of “Cthulhu”

The Subversion of Sense in “The Colour out of Space”

Tightening the Coil: The Revision of “The Whisperer in Darkness”

Lovecraft’s Role in “The Tree on the Hill”

Some Antecedents of the Shining Trapezohedron

III. Reviews

The Corrected Texts of Lovecraft’s Tales

The Dunwich Horror and Others (Arkham House)

At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (Arkham House)

Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (Arkham House)

The Annotated Revisions and Collaborations of H.P. Lovecraft (Arcane Wisdom)